News stories by Christopher Pala

WELLINGTON, Jun 08 (IPS) - In January, the revelation that Peter Thiel, the libertarian Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Trump adviser, secretly got a New Zealand citizenship six years ago caused an uproar, mostly because he was the first to get one without pledging to live there.

WASHINGTON, Sep 15 (IPS) - In a giant step for transparency at sea, environmentalists on Thursday unveiled a website that allows anyone with an Internet connection to see for free exactly where and when most of the world's industrial fishing boats actually fish.

WASHINGTON, Jun 23 (IPS) - In 2011, Dyhia Belhabib was a volunteer in the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver when she was asked to participate in the Sea Around Us's project to determine how much fish had been taken out of the world's oceans since 1950 in order to better avoid depleting the remaining populations of fish.

WASHINGTON, DC, Jan 21 (IPS) - A major new study has revealed that the global seafood catch is much larger and declining much faster than previously known.

KOROR, Palau, Dec 14 (IPS) - President Tommy Remengesau Jr. of the Pacific island nation of Palau has cemented a legacy as the world's most effective protector of marine life by creating a giant marine reserve that will directly benefit his people through increasing tourism and securing its food supply, scientists say.

WASHINGTON, Sep 27 (IPS) - President Barack Obama this week extended the no-fishing areas around three remote pacific islands, eliciting praise from some, and disappointment from those who fear the move did not go far enough towards helping depleted species of fish recover.

WASHINGTON, Aug 15 (IPS) - U.S. President Barack Obama has proposed to more than double the world's no-fishing areas to protect what some call America's underwater Serengeti, a series of California-sized swaths of Pacific Ocean where 1,000-pound marlin cruise by 30-foot-wide manta rays around underwater mountains filled with rare or unique species.

NAVIAVIA, Fiji, Jun 09 (IPS) - You can count the inhabitants of this isolated, tidy village of multi-coloured houses and flower bushes among global warming's first victims – but not in the usual sense.

WASHINGTON, May 09 (IPS) - After years of claiming untruthfully that the world's most fished marine protected area was "off limits to fishing and other extractive uses," President Anote Tong of the Pacific island state of Kiribati and his cabinet have voted to close it to all commercial fishing by the end of the year.

NASSAU, The Bahamas, Feb 28 (IPS) - The lionfish, with its striking russet and white stripes and huge venomous outrigger fins, wasn't hard to spot under a coral reef in 15 feet of clear water. Nor was it a challenge to spear it.